Reformers to Radicals (6 page)

In terms of Southern attitudes toward civil rights, Ayer's belief that the Council remain open to all turned into a strong integrationist stance. According to Loyal Jones, the Council's assistant executive secretary, when, in late 1963, Ayer learned that the Asheville, North Carolina, hotel that was to serve as the 1964 conference headquarters practiced segregation, he “hit the ciling [
sic
].” Using a segregated facility, Jones asserted, would be “compromising our principles.”
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Perhaps the most significant consequence of the open-door policy and its insistence that the people be involved in each reform effort was the Council's emerging conception of welfare. Reminiscent of New Deal concerns over dependency, this, more than any other facet of the Council's program, belied a purely charity orientation. In a statement to the CSM Board of Directors, Council leaders revealed their concern for both the plight of the mountaineer and what they feared was the Kennedy administration's attitude toward aid. “There was never a time in our history of this country and the Appalachian South,” Ayer declared in 1963, “when so many people were in such great need—need of education appropriate to the time, need of earning opportunity, need of hope and realistic aspiration, need of leadership which involves them in the process of their own salvation versus an insidious and growing system of paternal care which results in greater and greater dependency—than at this moment.”
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Ayer's appeal for responsible welfare was not limited to the Board of Directors. Invitations to the 1962 annual conference again went out to national officials, including those to Commerce Secretary Luther Hodges and Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Abraham Ribicoff, and revealed his apprehensions that the federal government would usurp the Council's role in the region. After the two administration officials declined their invitations, an irritated Ayer wrote to Brooks Hays, complaining that he could not “understand how they can be as concerned as they are about revitalizing the impoverished masses . . . and not jump at this opportunity to discuss some of their principles.” After all, the Council had banded together “with the express purpose” of working at this very task “in partnership with the government rather than in a continuing state of dependency upon [it].” For his part, Hays agreed with Ayer's argument that public assistance needed
to be linked with efforts at “individual improvement in order to promote individual self-respect.”
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Failing with the executive branch, Ayer turned his attention toward Kentucky's congressional delegation. Writing to Senator John Sherman Cooper and Congressman Carl Perkins, Ayer once more broached the subject of federally initiated aid to depressed areas. If Kennedy failed to include individual responsibility in his reform efforts, Ayer feared, he wrote Cooper, that, “inadvertently, we will give relief which merely keeps the carcass alive but erodes character.” Believing that rural development must begin with “people development,” Ayer called on Cooper to ask that a program that addressed the educational needs of a woefully undereducated Appalachian population be added to federal relief programs. Reiterating these ideas to John Whisman of the Eastern Kentucky Regional Planning Commission, the CSM leader argued: “Whatever we do must involve great numbers of individuals and must be something by means of which they can regain some of their individual value and independence, and not merely [create] a palliative situation.”
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The Council, moreover, was not content to just criticize or make suggestions. It backed up its words with ideas and plans for a comprehensive mountain aid package. First, Council leaders sought, through workshops and speeches at their conferences, to inspire young people from the mountains “to prepare themselves for service” in the Appalachian region. This, they reasoned, would stem migration north and help end welfare dependency. By creating a dedicated core of native mountaineers willing to work for solutions to the region's problems, the Council would realize its hopes for a program that restored dignity and a sense of self-worth. Second, the CSM requested a grant from the Social Security Administration to initiate a project that would prove the viability of a broad welfare concept utilizing human development along with economic aid. Rather than offering simply a monthly check and a periodic visit from a social worker, the Council of the Southern Mountains sought to use a number of people, such as county extension agents, public health nurses, and county school officials, to establish an aid program that truly helped mountaineers. While the county agent would help welfare recipients improve home gardens, the nurse would teach sanitary techniques and birth control, and the schools would conduct classes geared toward making the undereducated more employable. This
type of program, the CSM believed, would have three results: mountaineers would realize better living conditions; welfare recipients would face greater prospects for employment; and, most important, children, witnessing that education was the key to success, would gain the necessary motivation to stay in school.
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While the CSM itself lacked funds to administer such massive assistance measures on its own, it did what it could to help individual mountaineers, and it was in this way that it most resembled a charitable organization. Because of its many connections throughout the southern Appalachians, the Council facilitated the dissemination of donated material, such as clothes, vitamins, and shoes, to needy mountaineers. While less concerned with these types of handout efforts, the CSM still became the pipeline through which charitable donations flowed. It was not, in most cases, the entity that actually distributed the goods, but it did match requests from individual families or churches in the region with offers from the outside. Prior to the War on Poverty, for example, the Council helped distribute shoes and clothes to a family in Mount Sterling, Kentucky, and vitamins and toothpaste to Wise County, Virginia.
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In terms of health education, Ayer sponsored the “talking transparent women,” a traveling exhibit that taught about the inner workings of the human female. In June 1960, he dedicated $1,000 of CSM operating revenue to enable a health “field worker” to travel through eastern Kentucky in order to conduct health education lessons. Further, in May 1962, the Council helped host a “health fair” in Wolfe County, Kentucky. At this event, physicians tested for various diseases and administered inoculations to those who needed them. Additionally, there were demonstrations of proper food preparation and first aid along with advice on creating and adhering to a household budget.
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Members of the Council also fostered civic improvements in their own hometowns. This reflected one of the Council's most important goals in the area of community development—creating local leadership. As part of its overall emphasis on educational and health improvements, the Council concentrated most of its efforts in or near the larger towns, including Hazard and London, in eastern Kentucky. In Laurel County, Council members worked to expand the county library and to improve the local hospital. They conducted a general “clean-up campaign” and a drive to administer
the Sabin oral polio vaccine. Moreover, in the county seat, London, CSM members pushed for street repair and improvements to nearby Levi Jackson State Park. Similarly, in Perry County, Council members worked for a new health center, street and sidewalk improvements, and an upgraded sewage disposal plant.
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Underlying this somewhat limited activity was the ubiquitous lack of funds and an awareness of some of the fundamental problems in Appalachia. Though corporations provided the CSM with some revenue, the majority of its funding came from the Ford Foundation and the philanthropic Appalachian Fund. In November 1961, the Appalachian Fund announced a grant of $24,000 to the Council. According to the agreement, the CSM had to use nearly half this total ($10,000) for “economic development” and devote another $7,500 to health education. For its part, in January 1961 the Ford Foundation issued the Council of the Southern Mountains $35,000 to participate in the foundation's “Great Cities–Gray Areas” program. Similar to the urban workshops, this project was supposed to help Appalachian out-migrants, mostly those displaced by the mechanization of the coal mines, who had relocated to Northern cities in search of work. Essentially, the Ford Foundation believed that these transplanted mountaineers, the “fightin', feudin', Southern hillbillies and their shootin' cousins,” as the
Chicago Sunday Tribune
called them, were the cause of many of the urban problems in the North. In short, it hoped that the CSM could inform mayors, city councils, and government service agencies how to deal with their new, “culturally unique” residents.
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Working with the Gray Areas project may have been more problematic than it was worth. Not only did it draw Council efforts away from the mountains, but the incongruity of the maladjusted mountaineer in an urban ghetto posed a serious question for many in the CSM. Though many, from Bodnar to Harrington, had posed the question, the Gray Areas effort, more than any other, forced the CSM to actively face the issue of a dysfunctional Appalachian culture. Were Appalachians culturally unique? Why did they migrate? What more could be done to halt the flow north? In short, the Council had to ask itself one basic, fundamental question, one that it had not actually confronted thus far: What was the source of Appalachian poverty, and what was the best way of ending it?

After witnessing the unemployment caused by the combined effects
of mechanization and the concomitant decline in the demand for coal for over a decade, Ayer and the CSM reasoned: “If opportunities could be made more available locally, many trained young people would stay here in the mountains and contribute their abilities to making a better life for those around them.”
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This conclusion presented the Council of the Southern Mountains with two tasks: creating opportunities and training young people. While one Council enthusiast advocated the development of a tourism industry along with a concerted effort to lobby the federal government to build defense contractor plants in eastern Kentucky, Ayer chose another path, one that allowed the Council to remain focused on areas in which it was already active—education and urban migration.
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Perhaps influenced by Eli Cohen, the executive secretary of the National Committee on Employment of Youth, who spoke before the CSM annual conference in 1961, Ayer tended to think that a strong commitment to educational improvement in Appalachian Kentucky would create the trained workforce that attracted industry. According to Cohen, whose address underscored the observations made by such commentators as Bodnar, the technological revolution of the postwar era was “drying up economic opportunity for rural youth” on the farm. Unfortunately, technological advancements also hurt the prospects for gainful employment in manufacturing. Available research indicated that “rural youngsters will be forced to decide between staying in rural areas and operating farms with net yearly incomes of less than $1500 or migrating to urban communities for employment for which most will be unprepared.”
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Implicit in Cohen's analysis was the inadequacy of the rural mountaineers' lifestyle, echoing a nearly century-old explanation of Appalachian poverty and “otherness.” Advancements in technology in the post–World War II era had rendered rural Appalachians “contemporary ancestors.” This label, first used in 1899 by the Berea College president William Goodell Frost, implied that the region's rugged terrain had sheltered mountain residents from the influence of modern America and led to their destitution because of how their culture had evolved within the confines of the Appalachian Mountains. As a result, Appalachian residents, particularly those removed from the more urban county seats, retained their allegedly pure Scots-Irish heritage, their strict allegiance to family and clan, and folkways unchanged from frontier or Elizabethan times. This deviant culture, then,
contributed to their impoverishment because of the way it conflicted with mainstream American notions of individualism, progress, and acquisitiveness. Ironically, the Council of the Southern Mountains, with its publication of Jack Weller's
Yesterday's People
in 1963, became yet another purveyor of the image of the Southern highlands as a culturally unique and backward region.
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Though faced with, and actually part of, a long history that blamed Appalachia and Appalachians for the region's problems, the Council did realize the tremendous obstacle that it had to overcome. Any attempt to create a trained workforce in the mountains, the Council then thought, would effectively eliminate the derogatory label
ancestors
, create employment opportunities, and, finally, attract industry. All these potential results, however, hinged on improving education in the mountains, and the CSM had two alternatives at its disposal. The first of these called into question the efficacy of the school systems themselves. While one Council supporter alerted the organization's leadership to “irregularities” in the Pike County school superintendent's office, other education reform advocates, including important Council administrators, went further. Writing to the noted Appalachian novelist Harriette Arnow in 1961, the Council's assistant executive director, Loyal Jones, broached the subject of education, stating: “With our local county set up we still have the crookedness, graft, and poor instruction which Kentucky has been saddled with for so many years.” Jones reiterated this sentiment to Allen Trout of the
Louisville Courier-Journal
. “I am pretty sure that most . . . people do not really understand the political situation here in Kentucky and some of the other mountain states,” he declared, “and cannot really understand why we do not do things better than we do.”
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